by Candice Fox
I guess from that moment in the principal’s office I’d managed to be separated from the rest of the world in Amy’s mind. So she treated me like a human being and, however begrudgingly, put up with my childish bullshit, my rough-housing and my teasing. From what I heard from other people, though, she was very difficult to get to know. Pulled the ‘Me no speak Engrish’ act whenever she was approached by strangers, no matter how friendly they were. All that was crap, of course. She’d grown up in Wollstonecraft. When she couldn’t back out of interactions by playing the voiceless migrant, she could be openly aggressive, so the rumours went.
After her family was killed, the North Sydney bigwigs had approved her for a few low-profile administrative jobs here and there just to give her something to do while she hung around the station. She was a constant presence there after the murders, in the same clothes for weeks, just sitting in the waiting rooms staring at the crims or, if she could manage it, creeping into her dad’s office to sit in his big leather chair. People understood her obsession with the office – her father had been rooted to that chair in his glass cubicle, a silent figure tapping away at a computer, chasing down internet frauds, as rigid as a tree. I didn’t know him but I’d been aware of him, the way someone will be aware of a chair or a desk without really taking notice until it disappears or is moved. Detective Hooku didn’t move, though, until he disappeared, and all that remained of him was in that office. The office smelled like his cologne. It was covered in his used coffee cups. The laptop screen was marked with his prints.
Amy wanted to be close to her dead dad, so she kept sneaking into the headquarters.
They’d chase her out, the other cops, but she’d get back in through the fire escape doors. Once they had front and back door staff on the lookout for her, she stopped with the doors and started climbing in through a tiny window in the men’s room. After a while the North Sydney superintendent let her file incident reports as part of unofficial ‘work experience’, quietly, trying to avoid the scandal of a kid having access to sensitive criminal information. I avoided Amy as much as I could in those days, though I wasn’t around the station a lot anyway. I felt uncomfortable around her. I’d seen her family’s crime scene and didn’t know how to not think about that when I spoke to her.
Amy thrived in admin, but she was hard to entertain. She started messing around with the station computers, installing new programs, making things easier, better, fixing bugs none of us technologically illiterate dinosaurs had any idea about. When the Major Crimes Unit assembled a task force to combat online grooming of teenagers for underage sex, Amy watched while our out-of-touch middle-aged divorcees pretended to be young girls and boys in online chat rooms, and failed dismally. She knew all the language, the symbols. The cybercrime section of Major Crimes started letting Amy be in the room during online chat sessions, consulting verbally only. Then they let her sit in one of the chairs near a screen, still only verbally interacting with the crims, her words and advice translated through the police officer at the computer. Then, when someone got up to get a coffee one day, Amy slid into the driver’s seat and controlled the conversations with the online pedophiles, ‘supervised stringently’ by cybercrime officers. Amy’s ‘work experience’ had become work. She was still so young that had the papers got wind of what she was doing, the kinds of people she was talking to, there would have been a national scandal. Somehow the news never got out. It was because Amy was good. No one wanted to lose her.
She baited them, reeled them in, landed three major rock spiders in her first week officially on the job – one of them a cop at another station. She was a ruthless fisherman, an incredibly convincing liar. She could be a sexually confused fourteen-year-old boy in one chat window, and a nerdy, love-starved twelve-year-old girl in another. Her words were full of the misguided romantic fantasies so many normal young people her age brought to the online hunting grounds. She was fast and she was convincing. She set up names, family members, school grades, hobbies for her aliases. She could remember that the thirteen-year-old girl she was playing named Alice from Redfern had a cat called Stanley that’d been hit by a car and sprained its left back leg, at the same time as remembering that eleven-year-old Jessica from Mosman didn’t have pets because she got allergies. She had photographs for these people – multiple ones. I had no idea how she did it. Amy could lie like some of the worst sociopaths I’d ever met. Without hesitation. She was a hooker of bad men.
‘So what’s the story?’ I motioned towards the crowd under the tree.
‘Looks like a jogger copped it. Bashed, I think. I heard them saying she got it last night and someone’s called it in this morning.’
‘That’s no good.’
‘Nope.’
‘How’s your aunt?’
‘Oh Jesus. How’s your aunt?’
‘Alright, alright.’ I raised my hands in surrender. Amy had a real aversion to being treated like a child, even though she clearly was one. She let me get away with it most of the time, but when other people tried to mother her, she snapped. You couldn’t ask her how she was doing at uni or if she was seeing anybody or whether or not she was eating right. I wondered sometimes if she did eat right. She was all bones and sharp edges.
‘What’s your partner up to?’ she asked.
‘You know Eden?’
‘No. But I guessed she’s your partner.’
‘How?’
‘She’s giving you the stink eye.’
I looked over and saw Eden at the edge of the huddle, her eyebrows raised at me. I nudged Hooky off balance and ruffled her spikes.
‘See you round, punk.’
‘Yeah,’ she said.
Things were not good over by the tree. There was never any glamour to it. From what was left of the body I guessed she’d been a beautiful woman. Long muscular legs in torn purple nylon tights, matching top, one sleeve of a green jacket hanging from the left arm. No shoes. Sporty socks. Eden held the tarpaulin up and I peered in. The onlookers shuffled to get a glimpse. The blue light falling through the tarp onto the girl’s mashed face turned the bloody meat it had become purple, like she was wearing some melted Halloween mask. I looked for eye sockets but found none.
‘Someone’s angry,’ I said.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ Eden agreed.
Immediately, things start to pop and sizzle in your mind. Academy training in the psychological patterns of killers. An angry perp, someone capable of this kind of brutality, is usually known to the victim. Pretty difficult to get this aggressive, this violent, with a stranger. Facial injuries, in particular, are usually personal. The positioning of her body, lying on her back, hidden from view of the road – was the killer ashamed of his act? It was a bit confusing on that score. According to the textbook, a victim positioned on her back and uncovered suggested a willingness for the body to be found. Usually killers who are ashamed of what they’ve done curl the body on its side, suggesting peacefulness, sleep. Or they turn her over, hide the face and injuries in the grass. On the back, face up, is probably how the victim fell out of the guy’s arms, carried fireman-style and then flopped down, arms out. So the killer wasn’t displaying any shame in the positioning of the body. But leaving the victim off behind the bushes – that was strange. In the right circumstances, it could have been days before one of the joggers pumping along the road at the bottom of the hill smelled her, before someone let a dog off the leash and the beast came up here. A mixed display. Not ashamed, but not exhibitionist. There was an uncertainty about it.
This was probably a first kill.
I looked around at the paperbarks surrounding us, pale and spotted trunks that had stood watch over the girl’s final seconds. Or had they? There was no indication that the brutality had occurred here. No blood spatter. But the victim looked like a Centennial Park jogger. I’d been one myself once. Centennial Park is a great starting ground for weight-losers rather than serious runners – it’s mostly flat, and the familiarity of landmarks helps you control the pa
nic that you’ll never make it to the end. The main obstacles are old people, dogs, kids on push scooters. I shifted the girl’s shoulder up a fraction and looked at the lividity, the dark purple on her back and hips where the blood had begun to pool. There were carpet patterns in the blood on the backs of her arms.
So if the runner was picked up from here, but wasn’t killed here, why was she brought back here? Why risk returning a victim to the place where you abducted her? Was the location important to the killer? Maybe she wasn’t taken far. Maybe the whole thing happened in the park. I looked towards the road, at the cars parked under the trees.
‘Let’s set up a tent before we move her. I want to catch any fibres.’
Eden rose and directed a nearby tech to bring in a tent so we could examine the body without onlookers gawking at us. I instructed another to go down and get a video of all the cars in the immediate vicinity.
I heard a noise. I reached under the tarp and unclipped a mobile phone from the girl’s waist. Wires ran up through her shirt, under her bra, to her collar. I pulled the headphones clear and looked at the screen. Her running music was still playing. ‘Hazard’ by Richard Marx. Ominous. I scrolled through the songs and found the girl had a weird compilation going. Plenty of 1980s love ballads and murder songs. Depressed taste. A recent break-up? Was she pounding the pavement to lose the kilos gained during a now-dead relationship? I sat back on my haunches and realised it was the first personal thing I knew about the girl. Her current music taste. More personal details would follow, and they would all be sad to learn. Sometimes the stupidity of it hit me suddenly, right in the middle of the job. Everything she had been, whoever she was going to be – it was all over now.
‘Hey, dickhead,’ Hooky called. I looked over. She was standing closer now but still off and away from the centre of the crime scene, not wanting to contaminate any of it with her DNA. It’s shockingly easy to leave pieces of yourself at a crime scene. Just by standing there, flaking skin and dropping hairs like a tree shedding its winter leaves.
‘Did she have an app going?’ Hooky asked.
‘A what?’
‘An app.’
I looked at her blankly. Hooky beckoned me and I took the phone. I let her direct me around it. As a kid, there would be no handling evidence for her.
‘There are programs you can download onto your phone specifically for running,’ Hooky said. ‘They play your music, track your progress, time you, mark your distance and elevation.’
She gave me a bunch of very quick instructions. I stopped the music and brought up a screen full of numbers and images.
‘How the hell do they do that?’
‘GPS.’ She rolled her eyes. Eden looked over my shoulder. Hooky made me bring up a green and grey map crisscrossed with colourful lines and numbers in flashing bubbles.
‘See here?’ Hooky pointed with her pinky finger. ‘She did two laps of the park yesterday afternoon, 5.14 pm. Then she went off track … through the bushland over there, Queens Park Road. There was a pause of … three minutes. Then we’re onto a road. Her pulse goes up from 180 to 210 beats per minute.’
‘This thing can do heartbeats?’ I looked at Eden. She was deadpan. I guessed this kind of technology had been around for a while. I felt old.
‘Then she’s off again.’ Hooky frowned at the phone. ‘She speeds up to forty, then sixty kilometres an hour. Either the chick was running like the Terminator or she’s been put in a car.’
‘Fuck me!’ I said. ‘We can follow this right to the crime scene?’
Hooky tugged my arm back down so she could see the phone. ‘Yup. Looks like the killer drove her out to … Mangrove Road, Ashfield. Stopped for fifteen minutes. Then drove her back here.’
I pressed the bubble on Mangrove Road tentatively, not sure what would happen. A window opened marked with a small red X.
Heart rate error. Connection lost.
‘We’re going to need a secondary team to follow us and a third to check out the pick-up point by Queens Park Road.’ Eden turned and began walking towards the car. She beckoned for the head crime-scene tech and gave him instructions as she hobbled down the slope, her aluminium crutch making holes in the wet grass. ‘Frank, give me that phone. We need to get screen shots of the map and send them to headquarters.’
I glanced back at Hooky as I ran towards the car. She was at the top of the hill smiling to herself.
Eden gets this look about her when she’s on the hunt. She always has. Pointed. Cold. I like to try to keep things light and casual, especially when I’m a passenger with no way to control how fast the car’s going or which route we take. If I can’t keep a lid on my excitement, I start chewing my nails, my knuckles, my collar. My stomach starts churning.
Since her run-in with a killer, Eden’s pointed look has developed a really deadly edge. She drives like she’s handling a getaway car, sailing through gaps she has no cause to be confident about. I hung on to the seatbelt and tried to remember if you’re supposed to go stiff or limp in a crash. We headed across the city towards Ashfield with people leaping from crossings and holding their children as the sirens announced our approach. The radio was playing, and as news broke on the hour Eden glanced at it.
‘… the remains of at least four people in a burned-out Kombi van outside the Black Mutt Inn near Suffolk Park, just south of tourist hotspot Byron Bay. It is believed at least some of the victims suffered gunshot wounds. Police are asking –’
Eden switched the radio off.
‘Ashfield,’ I said, glancing at the phone now and then, trying to avoid making myself sick. ‘Why Ashfield?’
‘I don’t know,’ Eden said.
‘Bit of a horrible name for a place. Ashfield.’
‘You should pen a stern letter to the mayor.’
‘Maybe I will. The bus!’
‘I can see the fucking bus, Frank.’ Eden swerved.
‘Jesus Christ, we’re both gonna die.’
‘Would you shut up?’
‘Would you look at the road?’
Eden tossed a glance my way just as we blasted through a massive intersection, a half a second’s worth of gap between us and a removal van passing across our bonnet. Silence lingered in the car, my words pulsing. It’s always very present between us, the fact that Eden could at any time, and rightfully so, decide that killing me is the best thing for her future. As far as I could tell, it was only me and her father who knew what she really was, what she had done. People wonder, I’m sure. Our colleagues, our clients, some of the journalists who have covered her career. They wonder about that hard look, about her incredible instinct for catching killers, her seemingly biological ease at physical combat. She’s a natural chaser, hunter, fighter. Once a man in my very position got too close to discovering who Eden really was and her brother put a bullet in his head. Her brother was gone now. Eden had killed him to save my life. But I didn’t feel any safer. I couldn’t afford to.
Arriving at the scene was anticlimactic. In an alley between two warehouses in Ashfield’s industrial wasteland, the path the murdered girl had taken came to a point. Sandy black earth and bricks that hadn’t seen sunlight in years. Eden parked and we walked into the gap and looked ahead to the wire fencing at the end, the dead grass. There were a couple of boot prints beside a pair of tyre tracks. The tracks showed the vehicle had come into the gap, where the driver exited, walked around the vehicle, got in the back, exited again and got in the front. The GPS showed the van was stationary here for a mere fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to leave the victim totally unrecognisable.
Eden and I stood close enough, but not too close, waiting for the crime-scene techs. There were plenty of cigarette butts and bits of paper around for collecting. I don’t know about Eden, but I stood there still and silent because I wanted to be sad for a little moment at the sight of the footprints, the reading on the phone in my hand. The heartbeat rose. Then the heartbeat was lost. It was a lonely place to die.
‘Kill van,’
Eden said suddenly, nodding. I looked at her. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes squinting in the dim light, following the footprints back and forth. ‘It’s a good move. Mobile, so you can grab and go at any time. Easy to acquire. Don’t need to clean it. Just light it up and leave it. Ted Bundy had one for a while there.’
She sniffed and took her jacket off, crouched low with difficulty to look at the tyre prints. I felt a little ill and went back to the car to wait.
Hades Archer was starting to feel things were getting too quiet around the house when he noticed the men gathered at the bottom of the hill. He’d been told men his age became restless towards their twilight years and sought the company of people who didn’t necessarily want to hear their stories or drink their coffee. Men his age became a burden on people when they got bored. So the trick, it seemed, was not to get bored. Always have something brewing. A project. A purpose.
The average man took up golf in his retirement years. But Hades had never been close to average.
He kept this restlessness at bay by focusing on his work. His legitimate work, mostly. Waste rates in the city were always increasing, which meant he was constantly facing the challenge of finding space in his landfill for non-recoverable garbage. He spent the months carefully considering which technology upgrades he could get government funding for, how to make use of the non-recoverables, whether there were charities that could benefit from some of the items he couldn’t find buyers for – the thousands and thousands of bags of clothes, the old but still operational appliances, the building materials. He considered which landfill plots to turn over, knowing it took six or seven months for the bodies he hid beneath the layers of waste to degrade to the point that they wouldn’t be decipherable among the sludge and decay when the plots were dug up and relined for fresh garbage. He remembered where and when he’d buried people, and around about what their body type and fat content had been. He wasn’t dumb enough to write this down anywhere, so it was a purely mental game. A memory puzzle. He’d heard men his age were advised to play them to keep the brain ticking.
